Daytona secures $5M for open-source SaaS customisation

Croatian-founded Daytona, a platform that manages open-source development environments, has raised $5 million in seed funding. Led by Upfront Ventures with participation from existing investor 500 Emerging Europe, this new capital will enable Daytona to accelerate the expansion of streamlined development environments to developers. The company will use the funds for product development and hiring for new marketing, sales and engineering roles.

Daytona manages the process of creating standard and secure environments, automates environment
setups on branches, and allows users to share environments. It also integrates with IDE or Git providers, adhering to standards such as Development Container, Devfile, Nix and others.

The company has recently created an open source version geared toward individual developers that has seen strong demand, garnering 5,000 GitHub stars in two months. Daytona initially emerged as a solution tailored for large enterprises, enabling their developers to automate tasks, collaborate effortlessly, and enhance productivity albeit while adherent to enterprise security needs. Recognizing the importance of extending these benefits beyond large organizations, it has open sourced key components of its enterprise platform to empower the individual developers with the same streamlined development experience. One persistent challenge in the developer community is that inconsistent development environments lead to significant productivity losses. According to IEEE Journal, developers lose 56% of their productive time due to inefficient environments. Daytona addresses this issue head-on by allowing any developer to create a fully working environment with a single command, “daytona create.”

“Our goal is to make every developer more productive, while lowering the barrier to entry for newcomers by removing unnecessary complexities. Today, setting up a dev environment can feel like starting a car in the 1900s with many steps and points of failure,” said Ivan Burazin, co-founder and CEO of Daytona. “Daytona makes it as simple as starting a modern car today where you can just push a button and go. We help developers focus on what really matters to them, which is writing code and building innovative solutions."

“We’re thrilled to support the Daytona team on their mission to simplify development environments,” said Kevin Zhang, Partner at Upfront Ventures and new board member at Daytona. “The most forward thinking companies in the world have landed on cloud developer environments as a way of achieving a uniform developer environment for their teams. The Daytona founders have been working towards this since they created one of the first cloud IDEs over a decade ago. Their subject matter expertise and passion uniquely positions them to build a beloved developer experience that also satisfies even the strongest security requirements.”